Clara drew in her breath. She was mortified to be found in her kitchen in the late afternoon still wearing her robe, not to mention the broken china in the sink. If Nora breathed a word of this to anyone it would spread all over town. “You can’t just come in here,” Clara repeated, but the heat had gone out of her voice.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “I was just going to leave it on the counter with a note. It’s hotdish. Tater Tot hotdish. My specialty. I keep one stored in the freezers for funerals and such.”
Clara felt tired, so very tired. “No thanks.” The thought of soggy Tots soaking in gravy and beef left her queasy.
“But you have to eat for two,” Nora rushed on, her lips pursing. “You’re far too skinny. Roundness is the natural shape the Lord intended for things. The earth is round and the harvest moon over the corn.”
Clara had heard this lecture from her before. “I’m hardly skinny,” she said. “I’m fit to burst.” Fit to burst? Why was she talking this way? Why hadn’t she given the old bag the boot? Nora was one of those women who once lived on a family farm. A cheery, rotund woman who caused everything to bloom around her. It was as though, being round herself, she caused everything to plump and share that shape. And though her husband, she assured Clara on one occasion, had died of a massive heart attack due to clogged arteries, he went to his grave fat and satisfied.
“Why, let that prairie wind take hold of you and you’ll be tossed about like a weed,” she said.
Clara surprised herself by laughing and then caught sight of the mess in the sink again. Nora’s gaze followed hers. “It’s my fault. I have a terrible temper and was tired of looking at all those dishes.”
“Well, let me help you clean it up,” Nora said. “When I was pregnant sometimes the most rotten moods came over me.”
Clara looked at Nora, her blue hair, her face ruddy from the short walk, that cheerful voice.
“It’s true,” Nora said, reading the doubt in Clara’s eyes. “I once took a bat to my husband’s pickup after he went to the bar and left me alone with the kids on a Saturday night. Got both headlights before he stopped me.” Against her wishes, Clara felt herself smiling again as she imagined this turnip of a woman attacking her husband’s truck. “So you just let me clean this up. It’s one thing these old bones is good for.”
“No. I have to …”
Before she knew it, Nora had crossed the distance and put her hand on Clara’s. Her voice lowered. “Why don’t you go upstairs and run yourself a nice, hot bath? You leave this to me.” She squeezed Clara’s hand, gently insistent. “And don’t you worry about talk spreading uptown. I can keep a secret.”
Clara’s throat thickened, and she didn’t want to cry in front of her so she nodded and did as Nora asked. She was almost out of sight before Nora spoke again, an afterthought. “Why did Steve Krieger come by to visit?”
“Who?”
“Steve, the sheriff.”
The doorbell she had heard earlier when she was in the basement with the kittens.
“Don’t know,” she said quickly. “I didn’t get to the door in time. Maybe he was looking for Logan. Will Gunderson’s funeral is a couple of days from now.”
“Oh. He’s a vigilant one, our law enforcement officer. Neither he nor Will Gunderson are the type of people you would ever want to cross.” She shook her head. “Not that you need to worry about that.”
THE BATH PROVED EVERY bit as restorative as Nora had promised. Clara put on her terry-cloth robe, a towel wrapping her hair, and went to the window. Nora was already heading home. She thought of how kind the woman had been to her on first coming here, how eager she was for the baby, telling Clara how she’d raised eight children into the fullness of adulthood and could salve, rub Vicks Vapo, or chicken soup her way through the most dire illness. But oh! There was one lost one, a boy she could not save from childhood leukemia. She thought about him every living day.
Nora went directly to her garden and knelt on rickety knees in the grass. In the center of the vegetables, now husked brown and raked over, there stood a short statue of the Virgin Mary left there by her